I lost both of my parents within two years of each other in my late teens. A local priest who was around during that time became someone I got close to, and when I was 21, we were in a relationship for almost two years. I'm in my late 40s now, and I started therapy before Christmas because I was having a lot of anxiety after he nearly became part of a family engagement. I've always felt like it was a relationship that shouldn't have happened, and now I think it was exploitation. My therapist told me that at 21 we aren't fully developed, and I'm starting to see how vulnerable I was. But I still carry guilt and shame, and I feel angry that he's gotten away with it. Some days I want everyone to know what he did, but then I worry I'd be exposing myself and that people would judge me more than him. Even though therapy has helped, it still feels unfinished. But then I think I'm making a bigger deal out of it than it is, because I consented, so I should just get over it.

Thank you for trusting us with something you have been carrying for so long. What you are describing, the grief, the confusion, the anger that has nowhere to go, the shame that keeps turning back on you when it belongs somewhere else entirely, is an enormous weight. The fact that you are still working through this in your late forties is not a sign that you are weak, or stuck, or making too much of it. It is a sign that something real happened to you, and that it has never been fully named or taken as seriously as it deserves.

You lost both of your parents within two years of each other, while you were still a teenager. That is an extraordinary amount of grief for a young person to carry. By any honest measure, you were in one of the most vulnerable states a person can be in. And into that grief came a priest. A priest is someone whose entire role is built on spiritual authority and the responsibility to protect the people who come to him for comfort. He knew your family. He was present during your losses. And then, when you were 21 and still raw with grief, he entered into a relationship with you. What followed was built on a deep imbalance of power, grief, and need. 

Your therapist is right that at 21 the brain is still developing, particularly the parts that govern judgment, risk assessment, and the ability to fully see the power dynamics we are inside of. And there is something even more important than brain development here. You were not simply a 21-year-old. You were a 21-year-old who had just lost both of her parents and who had come to trust and depend on this man during the most destabilizing years of her life. Consent, to mean anything real, requires that both people are standing on roughly equal ground. It sounds like you were not. You were grieving, young, and dependent on someone who held enormous spiritual and emotional authority over you. That is not a situation in which genuine, free consent is possible, regardless of what you technically said yes to.

The guilt and shame you feel are not evidence that you did something wrong. They are among the most common and most painful effects of exploitation by someone in a position of trust. When the person who harms us is also someone we needed, someone who offered comfort and closeness during a time of profound loss, the feelings become tangled in ways that are genuinely hard to separate. You may have wanted the relationship in some ways, and that does not mean you were not exploited. Both things can be true at once. The wanting does not cancel the harm, and the harm does not erase the complexity of what you felt. Shame is also something the mind reaches for when something painful has no other easy explanation. If you can blame yourself, at least the world makes sense. That kind of shame is a wound left by the exploitation itself, not a signal that you did something wrong.

The anger you feel toward him is not out of proportion. It is accurate. He was in a position of sacred trust and he used your grief as an opening. The fact that he has moved through life without consequence, close enough to your family that he nearly attended a family engagement, is its own particular injury. That closeness, that normalcy on his part, can make survivors feel invisible and unheard in a way that is genuinely painful all over again.

The tension you feel about whether to tell people is something many survivors of clergy exploitation carry. You are right that there is a real risk of being judged, and that the judgment often lands more heavily on the person who was harmed than on the person who caused the harm. That is an injustice, and it is yours to weigh. There is no obligation to expose yourself before you are ready, or at all. Your healing does not require public disclosure. And at the same time, the anger that makes you want people to know is not irrational. It is a completely understandable response to watching someone escape accountability. 

The feeling that therapy is unfinished is worth listening to. Some survivors of clergy or authority-figure exploitation find that individual therapy alone does not fully address every dimension of this kind of harm, including the spiritual injury, the breach of institutional trust, and the particular shame that comes from relationships society tends to either romanticize or dismiss. You might find it helpful to raise that feeling of unfinished work directly with your therapist, not as a criticism of what you have done together, and as honest information about where more support is still needed. Organizations like SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, also offer peer support specifically for people who have experienced what you experienced. Being in community with others who understand this particular kind of betrayal can reach something that individual therapy sometimes cannot.

You wrote that you feel you are making a bigger deal of it than it is because you consented, so you should just get over it. I want to stay with that for a moment. You do not need to get over this. You need to be able to set it down, and that is a different thing entirely. Setting it down requires that it first be fully acknowledged for what it was. You were a grieving young woman and he was a man who held power over your pain. You deserved protection, not a relationship. The fact that you consented does not change what he owed you, and it does not mean you have nothing to grieve or be angry about. It means you were human, and he took advantage of that.

You are not making too much of this. You are finally, perhaps for the first time, making exactly enough of it. We are here whenever you need to come back.